The Dark History of Ikea

In 1931, a five-year-old Swedish boy began selling matchsticks to his neighbors. Twelve years later,

that boy would go on to found what would become the world’s largest furniture retailer. This is

the story of how the creations of a dyslexic farm boy became a part of every home in the world.

Ingvar Kamprad was born in 1926 on his family farm near Agunnaryd in Småland,

Sweden. The farm was located in an area that was known to produce more stone than crop,

and whose residents were known to be rather financially creative. Like them, young Ingvar was

overcome with an enterprising spirit that would ensure that his family would not need to rely

on the scant crop yield to survive. At just five years old, Ingvar began repackaging and selling

matches that his aunt would buy in bulk in the city. With each small profit made, he would set

aside some money to reinvest into his operations. A few short years later, Ingvar’s business had

expanded into a mobile store, based out of his mother’s bicycle. He would cycle to

the neighboring farms providing a variety of products from magazines and Christmas cards,

to vegetable seeds and fish caught on the family boat. Soon enough, he had made a sufficient

amount of money to replace his mother’s bike with one of his own; but Ingvar never lost

sight of the bigger picture. Why stop at a bicycle, when he was building a business?

With a mind made for commerce, Ingvar convinced his father to upgrade the fishing nets used on

the boat to larger ones, allowing them to catch more fish, and in turn allowing Ingvar to sell

more. More sales meant more money, which meant more expenditure to fund his future endeavors.

Even the confines of boarding school, away from his customers on the farms of Agunnaryd,

did not stifle Ingvar’s enterprising nature. A new environment simply meant new customers,

and customers needed products. So armed with an array of wallets,

pens, belts, and watches purchased with the savings made from his previous endeavors,

Ingvar arranged a selection of products that would turn his classmates into customers.

His time at school would prove to be enlightening, for by the time Ingvar

completed his education three years later, he had a greater ambition than to cycle around the

farmlands selling fish and seeds, and a well placed graduation gift would see this ambition

through. Ingvar had decided that he would own and operate his own firm, an official form of

the businesses he’d been running throughout his childhood. And so, in 1943, with a registration

fee covered as a gift from his father, seventeen-year-old Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA.

Named for the town closest to his childhood home, the family farm, and his own initials,

Ingvar Kamprad’s IKEA began as a fully-realized version of his childhood exploits. Originally,

IKEA functioned as a mail-order service operating out of a rented milk van. It could be accessed

through brochures that detailed a selection of products initially confined to household goods.

Things like pens and watches, which Ingvar had sold as a teenager in boarding school,

to new items such as picture frames and jewelry. The main draw of the items was

their low price and the accessibility of it all, with the early dealings of IKEA focusing on the

rural towns that Ingvar was more familiar with. With time, the brochure would expand to include

a larger variety of items. With each new addition, Ingvar would rely on consumer

feedback to dictate product stocks. Unpopular items would be reduced and eventually removed,